Michael Levin and Donald Hoffman discussing consciousness

Post Reply New Topic

Really glad to see Michael Levin and Donald Hoffman in discussion here.

Quick list of their credentials for anyone not familiar:

Michael Levin is an American developmental and synthetic biologist at Tufts University, where he is the Vannevar Bush Distinguished Professor. Levin is a director of the Allen Discovery Center at Tufts University and Tufts Center for Regenerative and Developmental Biology.

Donald David Hoffman is an American cognitive psychologist and popular science author. He is a professor in the Department of Cognitive Sciences at the University of California, Irvine, with joint appointments in the Department of Philosophy, the Department of Logic and Philosophy of Science, and the School of Computer Science.


In this they're discussing the overlap in their work, findings, and theories. Levin comes from a non-reductive base that's relatively agnostic to whether or not it's materialist, it's physicalist in terms of sufficient causation (really any theory needs that) but his main thrust is that ion channel communication, particularly best known for it's use in cell differentiation in embryos, came before neurons and Michael would argue that consciousness and a plurality of conscious 'selves' go all the way down from highest to lowest collation of consciousness in a fractal / holographic manner. Hoffman would agree with all of this but his work, with Chetan Prakash and his team, focuses on an absolute idealist frame but absolute idealist in a very granular, functionalist kind of way where he ends up in somewhat the same advaitic place as Michael Silberstein just that I don't know that I've ever heard Donald Hoffman say that his and Chetan Prakash's theories are Minkowski eternal block in the way that Silberstein's adynamic global constraints would be, I think Hoffman might be non-committal with that because he doesn't want to close the door to whether they find something even stranger - his and Prakash's main idea is to look at the decorator permutations that feed into Nima Arkani Hamed's amplituhedron to see if they can pull all of known physics out of that structure as they also have a strong sense that their theory ties into that object.

Also yes, for those who are familiar with Karl Friston's work with Markov blankets as well as Chris Fields, Levin has a close working relationship with both of them as he's working similar ideas to their own from the experimental end.